The Ideological Foundations of Critical Race Theory - World Socialist Web Site

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The ideological foundations of Critical Race Theory - World Socialist Web Site: 

Excerpt from conclusion below--whole article at link above highly recommended to understand the dangers of embracing Critical Race Theory

While critical race theory postures and presents itself as a continuation of the mass civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, nothing could be further from the truth. With its insistence that white people and black people essentially comprise incompatible species who have been at war with each other throughout history, critical race theory has less in common with Martin Luther King than it does with Adolf Hitler. Among the ideological precursors of critical race theory, in that respect, is the racialist pseudoscience that emerged in the late nineteenth century, “social Darwinism,” which purported to replace the class struggle in history with concepts borrowed from Darwin’s discoveries related to biological evolution, reimagining history not as a struggle between social classes, but as a process of competition and “natural selection” among biologically distinct races.

At the time of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks likewise had to confront efforts to stir up racial, religious and national hatreds aimed at destabilizing and dividing the workers movement.

“When the accursed tsarist monarchy was living its last days, it tried to incite ignorant workers and peasants against the Jews,” Lenin explained in a 1919 radio address. “The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews.”

“It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people,” Lenin said. “The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews, there are kulaks, exploiters and capitalists, just as there are among the Russians, and among people of all nations.”

“The capitalists strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races,” Lenin continued, concluding his address with the words: “Long live the fraternal trust and fighting alliance of the workers of all nations in the struggle to overthrow capital.”

A hundred years later, the basic conceptions articulated by Lenin remain a centerpiece of the Marxist tradition. Within every so-called “race,” there are the working people who form the majority, who are oppressed by capital and who are the brothers and sisters and natural comrades of all other workers on the planet. And within every “race,” there is a minority consisting of the capitalist class and its privileged agents.

Socialists around the world are engaged in the complex and challenging struggle to unite the working class—including people of different nationalities, genders, languages, religions, ages and customs—for a common struggle for peace, progress and equality.

This certainly involves fighting and exposing prejudice and injustice wherever we encounter it, as it always has—if we see it, we won’t stand for it—but we understand that prejudice survives not because it is fixed eternally in human psychology but because capitalism survives to nourish it. We explain to workers and young people how prejudice is cultivated and exploited to undermine class solidarity, and how overcoming those prejudices is not simply morally right but historically necessary.

The coming revolutionary upheavals around the world will bring hundreds of millions of people into struggle. The forces exerted on the revolutionary movement will be tremendous. A movement that is cracked and fractured along racial or national or gender lines will not be able to withstand those forces and will quickly break apart the moment real pressure is brought to bear. A world movement that can weather the revolutionary maelstrom must be prepared to advance a unified world perspective, applicable to all workers, from a shared understanding of its own history to its basic philosophical foundations and method, class orientation, conception of the epoch and strategy for victory. This is the real strength of a political movement—the glue that will hold it together through any crisis.

For these reasons, the answer to the bigotry of the Republicans and Trump is not to give an inch to the racial sectarianism of the Democrats and critical race theory. Rather, we must build international workers’ solidarity, which is an essential condition for the advance of human civilization and culture and for the final defeat of all forms of prejudice.